Want to avoid holiday stress? Take care of your mercury monitoring now for a happy Christmas
Christmas can be a stressful time. You have to buy gifts, decorate, bake sweets, attend parties, and avoid talking to that one relative that always drives you crazy. But if you think you’re stressed now, wait until 2023. That’s when the Best Available Techniques Reference documents on waste incineration (WI BREF) will require stricter mercury monitoring on larger waste incinerators in Europe. Merry Christmas! The emission limit range will be 5-20 µg/m3 for all facilities burning waste. If you want to have a happy Christmas, you never need extra stress from work keeping you up at night. That means that you need to think about mercury monitoring now.
What are the options for complying with the new mandates on mercury monitoring?
WI BREF mandates that flue gas be continuously monitored for mercury compound concentrations. In exceptional cases where a low, stable concentration of mercury can be proved, periodic or long-term sampling can be used. In practice, however, the mercury content of waste incineration flue gas is rarely stable. Any incineration plant dealing with municipal waste will be burning heterogeneous waste streams with randomly varying mercury content and will most likely be ineligible for exemption for these requirements. Even plants burning more homogeneous waste streams will still experience fluctuations. For instance, mercury content tends to spike when starting the incineration process on new waste batches.
Because of this, continuous measurement is the best option for plants needing to upgrade their systems. And if your plant needs to upgrade its mercury monitoring system, you need to check out the benchmark in continuous mercury monitoring: the Gasmet CMM and CMM AutoQAL systems. They have the lowest certified measuring range (0-5 µg/m3, certified by TÜV and MCERTS) for compatibility with current and possible future regulations. Based on current practices and regulations, even if the WI emission limit went as low as 3.5 µg/m3 our system would still fulfill the requirements, ensuring a future-proof solution.
Will a Gasmet mercury monitoring system fit in our budget?
Like everyone else, you want your plant to be cost-efficient as well. The maintenance and running costs of the CMM and CMM AutoQAL systems are extremely low. With other systems, the monitoring must be regularly validated by a certified stack testing company. The annual cost of a stack testing validation service can be 6000€ or more, to say nothing of the man-hours wasted in scheduling these visits and escorting the testers around your plant during the test campaign.
Compare that to the CMM AutoQAL system. It has automatic true QAL3 quality assurance testing that automates this entire process. There is no need for third party testers or additional work from the plant staff. The system has an automatic test gas generator that, as programmed, creates the test gasses and runs the QAL3 check at defined intervals. The results are automatically transferred to the facility control center, meaning that the mercury monitoring process is always handled with minimal additional work and running costs. The CMM AutoQAL option is certified and can therefore be used in all mercury monitoring applications, saving time, money, and headaches.
| Mercury Emission Monitoring – CMM & CMM AutoQAL
Continuous Mercury Monitoring systems CMM AutoQAL and CMM are the perfect solutions for monitoring mercury continuously from hot, wet and corrosive gas streams. These future-proof systems have the lowest certified range in the world (0-5 µg/m3) and CMM AutoQAL has an automatic and integrated QAL3 validation tool. |
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